Cassie Alexander - Bloodshifted

Something cold and angry flowed through my veins. I felt as though a tap had been turned on inside myself; it had that feeling you get after certain shots or drugs, where your body knows that what is entering isn’t right. It felt like liquid death—like I imagined embalming fluid would feel if someone held me down and plugged it into my carotids. I forced myself to breathe in and out silently and listened with ears that were eerily good for my attacker. I was standing between him and the door, and he had to know that I had the hammer—he was probably trying to figure out if I was willing to use it.

Half of me was. I could see myself cracking his skull like an eggshell, and while the thought of his brains spilling out made part of me recoil in disgust, this new dark part of me was completely fine with him getting what he deserved. I shivered in the darkness, trying not to listen to it.

A true daytimer wouldn’t think twice about mayhem, and neither did this new part of me. I could feel muscles bunching up without thought, as half of me readied like a hunting cat.

But I wasn’t one of them yet, and I didn’t even want to be one. I hadn’t gotten a choice in being changed—and I didn’t want anyone’s brains on my hands. Maybe I’d feel differently later, or I’d invest in gloves, but not today.

I took the hammer in both hands and snapped the head of it off at the top of the handle before I could do anything else.

The man ran past me at the sound, rushing for the door. I swung the shaft of the hammer up like a club, catching him in his chest and taking him down to the ground on instinct, and then, holding the head of the hammer in my hand like a roll of quarters, I knelt down and punched his stomach, hard. I felt the infirmity of flesh as he gasped, all the air knocked out of him.

Just because I didn’t want to kill him didn’t mean I wanted him to escape.

I knew whatever advantage I had could be temporary, so I didn’t stop. I was scared to set him free until I found out who he was and why he’d attacked me. He tried to leverage his legs up, and I swung the shaft out to the side, punching at this new target as hard as I could without thought, catching him simultaneously hearing and feeling his nearest femur snap. Oh, God—

He exhaled in a rush of pain, and then gasped, “Mercy!”

A ploy to gain time to heal? I didn’t want to hit him a second time—but would he fight me again if I didn’t keep breaking things? He’d tried to kill me—and my baby. I let the darkness do what it wanted to in me and swatted the hammer’s handle down again, smashing the same spot on his leg between the hard wood and the stone floor, hearing a fresh crack.

“Mercy!” he grunted.

The obvious pain in his voice brought me back from the brink. This wasn’t me. I couldn’t torture someone who’d already surrendered. Taking in a shuddering breath, I lowered the handle to the ground. “Jackson!” I howled—hoping that the person I was using as a punching bag wasn’t him.

The light came on in the room, momentarily blinding me. My opponent was blinded too, lying in front of me, leg mangled but healing. It was Lars. Celine—present for the whole fight, ensconced on her bed—finally intervened.

“Why did you attack me?” I shouted down at him. I could see his loose leg pulling into place, the bone resetting. “Why?” I shouted at the top of my lungs. Soon he’d be better and I’d have to make a horrible choice—

“Edie!” came a new voice. I whirled, and Jackson was in the doorway. “Calm down. You’re safe.”

“No I’m not! He attacked me!” I clutched the fist with the hammerhead in it to my chest.

“You’re winning. You’ve won.” Jackson patted the air between us to calm me as if I were a wild horse.

“But he tried to kill me! Why?”

Jackson spared Lars a dark look. “He fought you because he thought he had to. Because he’s a fool.”

Time slowed back down as I did, and I realized my entire fight with Lars had taken thirty seconds. A minute, tops. I looked down at Lars, his leg slowly becoming whole, and looked at Jackson to watch his face when he answered me.

“Will he attack me again?”

“Probably not tonight.” He frowned, but I didn’t get the sense he was lying.

And now that I could see I was kicking and breaking someone already down on the floor—I shook my head and quickly stood up.

“Mercy, mercy,” Celine taunted Lars, from the safety of her bed. Now that he wasn’t in mortal peril, Lars scrabbled backward. It seemed like it was taking him longer to heal each time. Maybe injuries were cumulative? I already knew from Y4 that the healing properties of vampire blood were finite, one of many reasons why daytimers stayed close to their Masters.

“You and Lars and Natasha share the same Master. There’s not always enough blood to go around—and blood is power,” Jackson explained, as Lars transformed from someone who looked like he’d lost a fight back to the man I’d seen earlier this morning, minus his torn clothes.

“I was here before you,” Lars growled. “Never forget that.” He brushed by me on purpose on his way out of the room. I stood my ground as his shoulder hit mine.

“So he thought he’d get the drop on me? By attacking me my first night out?”

“He was hoping the blood hadn’t taken yet. Apparently, it has.” Jackson shrugged. “Plus, he’s not much for long-term planning. He’s not the lull-you-into-a-sense-of-comfortable-security type.”

I stared at him, trying to keep my thoughts off my face.

“Like me,” he added, with a wolfish grin. My fist tightened around the added weight of the hammerhead. “Oh, come on, you knew we were both thinking it,” he went on.

Despite my horror, it was hard not to crack a smile. I tossed the hammer handle up and down in my left hand. It was old wood, solid. “The only thing I know for sure now is the next person who tries to wake me is going to get hurt.”

Jackson, still grinning, gave me a short bow. “Then I believe I’ll leave you two ladies to sort things out.”

I watched him head out the door—and realized what the bell I’d seen earlier was for. Daytimers might not be allowed to lock their doors, but they could make sure guests wouldn’t arrived unannounced. Celine had come in last, and she hadn’t set the bell. She’d known Lars would come for me tonight.

Which meant she was conniving, or she didn’t like to dirty her own hands—or she knew she was too weak to fight me herself. I turned toward her, where she sat on her black bed in her black slip—given the whiteness of her limbs, she looked like a porcelain doll—and I kept my eyes on her as I stalked across the floor and set the bell’s hinge out, so we wouldn’t get any other unannounced company. Her lips tightened at this. She knew she’d been caught. Then I walked over to the destroyed cot.

The frame was bowlegged from the violence of Lars’s blow. And the stone that’d weathered the hammer’s first hit was chipped. Exactly where my brainpan would have been if I’d still been lying down at the time. No wonder everything in here was black—it made it easier to hide the blood.

I swept my sheets up and turned back toward her, staring her down while wearing my ridiculous clothing, my spandex skirt only fractionally below my crotch, with the hammer handle in one hand like a knife, and my fist still around the hammerhead brass knuckles I’d made at my side.

I’d won. I could ask for the bed now, and get it. I could make her sleep not on a cot, but on the floor, in the hall. Or in her bed with me, doing whatever I liked.

Or I could be kind to her and manage to live with myself for another day.

The thing was, if I did that, she’d think I was weak. She’d tried to have me killed—and showing her mercy would earn myself nothing in return. I’d had too many sociopaths before as patients at work; I knew how they worked. No matter how kind you were to them, some dogs would always bite.